SimpliVity CEO excels at getting job done

Sunday

Nov 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Peter Cohan WALL & MAIN

which has built a computer technology that makes it less expensive for companies to expand their computing infrastructure — is a world-class execution machine. While Chief Executive Officer Doron Kempel isn’t killing anyone, his company simply excels at “getting stuff done.”

As a major in the Israel Defense Force at age 26, Mr. Kempel was a decorated second-in-command member of an elite unit, and led “meticulously planned and scrupulously executed missions far away from Israel and way behind enemy lines.” Importantly, in Mr. Kempel’s view, “his mentors include generals, former prime ministers, chiefs of staff and other execution and strategy luminaries.” Before that, in his teens, he was an athlete on the national Israeli handball squad.

Following degrees from Tel-Aviv University and Harvard Business School, he joined a Silicon Valley startup, as vice president of sales and marketing, that was bought. He moved on to EMC, where he viewed then-CEO Mike Reuttgers as “a great positive influence as a leader and a manager,” to set up a new independent business unit. Mr. Kempel grew that division “from zero to multihundred-million dollars in annual revenue” under EMC’s new CEO, Joe Tucci, who he called “a great strategist.” With the “technologically brilliant” Moshe Yanai, Mr. Kempel started Diligent Technologies. In 2008, Mr. Kempel sold Diligent to IBM, which called Diligent “the best run small company IBM has ever acquired.” Mr. Kempel, who proudly noted that “all of Diligent’s managers have been consistently promoted within IBM since the acquisition,” spent 15 months at IBM to make sure the company was successfully integrated into Big Blue.

When he started SimpliVity, IBM contributed to his views on how to run his startup. As he explained in an Oct. 26 meeting at his office, what he learned from these varied experiences help him to “architect, lead and manage” SimpliVity.

As I wrote in September, SimpliVity raised $25 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins. In that interview, the Kleiner partner, Matt Murphy, said Mr. Kempel was an “execution machine.” That got me wondering what Mr. Murphy meant, and Mr. Kempel was kind enough to take an hour to try to explain that to me.

Execution is important to SimpliVity because it competes with big companies to sell a “mission critical” product. If SimpliVity has any hope of surviving, it must take business from these rivals. If SimpliVity can execute well, “It can translate to better, faster product development, stronger partnerships, better decision making, a higher degree of customer satisfaction, retention and ultimately, higher sales and higher valuation,” according to Mr. Kempel.

What is execution? A complete answer is complicated. To Mr. Kempel, just as a race car gets its driver around the track faster than his rivals, a company should be a “system that must be architected in pursuit of a mission.” Each person working in the company should achieve a specific goal in a way that is “consistent with the organization’s mission, norms and processes.”

Think about the job of a salesperson who agrees with her manager to set an “aggressive but achievable” goal of selling $3 million worth of a company’s product in the next three months. Execution means, in part, that at the end of three months, the salesperson has achieved the $3 million sales quota.

But to Mr. Kempel, process matters. If the salesperson angers her colleagues by not communicating with her peers or manager, fails to respond to peer requests for help, and closes sales while acting in ways inconsistent with company values, Mr. Kempel would likely manage her out of the company. In this example, “she achieved her personal goal, but did so at an unacceptable risk/cost to the overall system,” said Mr. Kempel.

But in a company that hires all sorts of different people, execution — or what Mr. Kempel calls “IntoAction” — is a system whose elements reinforce each other. IntoAction flows from the company’s mission — its long-term reason to exist — which Mr. Kempel communicates repeatedly and clearly. IntoAction’s other elements include core competencies (critical activities like product design and sales that help SimpliVity realize its mission), norms (the way its people should behave), and its people, whose skills and actions should “align” with IntoAction. And tying all of these together is what Mr. Kempel calls its “programs, processes, standards, and techniques — without which, all the rest is just poetry.”

Beyond applying five principles of execution that may not interest the general reader, SimpliVity also trains managers in skills such as project management, planning and decision making to emphasize company-specific “principles, guidelines, standards, templates and acronyms.”

Despite all the processes, nothing is more powerful than the power of leaders to influence others through their actions.

“In 35 years of leadership and management — in sports, military and business — I have seen no substitute for leadership by example. If the managers and leaders do not live, breathe and exemplify the norms, then the execution-system will fail.”

If Mr. Murphy is right, Mr. Kempel’s execution machine will work wonders. And that means SimpliVity’s customer base will grow, its employees will enjoy making that happen, and Kleiner Perkins and the other investors will enjoy an attractive return.